i am totally ripping this from mark batterson’s incredible book, in a pit with a lion on a snowy day. it is a great piece that i want to share and hopefully challenge you with. as a side note, if you are some one who has found themselves in the middle of a transition, you need this book!

according to a.w. tozer, the most important thing about you is what comes to mind when you think about God.

“… the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like… were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘what comes to your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. (a.w. tozer, the knowledge of the holy)

how you think about God will determine who you become. you aren’t just a byproduct of “nature” and “nurture”. you are a byproduct of your God-picture. and that internal picture of God determines how you see everything else.

most of our problems are not circumstantial. most of our problems are perceptual. our biggest problems can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of who God is. our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. in fact, we reduce God to the size of our biggest problem.

tozer said a “low view of God… is the cause of a hundred lesser evils.” but a person with a high view of God “is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.”

“I don’t think the way you think.
The way you work isn’t the way I work.”
God’s Decree.
“For as the sky soars high above earth,
so the way I work surpasses the way you work,
and the way I think is beyond the way you think. – isaiah 55:8-9 (the message)

i can certainly attest this principle to be true in my own life. i can look back on specific instances when how i approached or walked through a particular situation in my life was in direct correlation to how i perceived God in that season of my life. i am thankful that seasons change and we grow, thus providing opportunities for our understanding and perception of God in our lives to increase as well. there are things that happened to me in the past which, were they to play out again today, would not produce the same response from me, primarily because of who i am continually becoming as a direct result of what i continually and increasingly understand about God.

what about you? how has your approach to life been altered by your perception and understanding of who God is over the years?